Quotes About Teamwork

We know there's no love of your life. Love isn't terrifying like that. It's walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it's doing taxes, it's cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It's having an ally in life. It's not fire, it's not lightning.

somebody has to catch the mouse. So here's my proposal. You be the strong one Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. And I'll be the strong one Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

A prodigy is a group enterprise.

Is the result of cooperation the seizing of power? Not so: cooperation mysteriously creates more power than there was before, so that the more we work together the more power we discover is available to us.

but how are you going to get the rocks into her pack without her seeing?' 'I'm not going to put the rocks in her pack,' I say. 'You are.' 'Me?' says Danny. 'What

Kristy and the Dirty Diapers

Remerber when the Babbysiters club took car of forteen children?

one hider and all the other players are seekers. When a seeker finds the hider, he doesn't just win that round of the game, he hides with him. The next person to find the hiders hides with them, too, and so on until one seeker is left. That seeker is the loser and starts out the next round of the game as the hider. The tricky thing when you're the hider is finding a big enough hiding place in which to fit a whole lot of other people.

The whole club has been Abbified. Everyone had grown lazy while I was gone. Or maybe they weren't lazy. Maybe I was being too stubborn. (Hard to imagine, I know.) Sometimes you have to give a little to keep people happy.

I pushed my chair back and stood up. Look, I invented the Baby-Sitters Club. The whole idea was to work together, human-to-human contact, over the phone and in meetings. If you don't have that, you don't have a club. Period. Kristy...., Mary Anne pleaded. But I'd heard enough. I picked up my tray and walked away. I had completely lost my appetite.

Claudia is vice-president of the Baby-sitters Club. As I mentioned, we use her room as our headquarters and it's her phone number that our clients call. She is also in charge of making sure none of us starves to death.

Keeping so many people motivated to do the best job possible involves a lot of the different programs and approaches we've developed at Wal-Mart over the years, but none of them would work at all without one simple thing that puts it all together: appreciation. All of us like praise.

If I'm going to fly around all over the country telling these folks they're my partners, I sure owe it to them to at least hear them out when they're upset about something.

For example, we've got this one rule I hope we never give up enforcing: our buyers here in Bentonville are required to return calls from the stores first, before they return the calls of vendors or anybody else, and they are required to get back to the stores by sundown of the day they get the call.

If you're not serving the customer, or supporting the folks who do, we don't need you. When we're thinking small, that's another thing we're always on the lookout for: big egos. You don't have to have a small ego to work here, but you'd better know how to make it look small, or you might wind up in trouble.

I guess that was the forerunner of our Saturday morning meetings. We wanted everybody to know what was going on and everybody to be aware of the mistakes we made. When somebody made a bad mistake—whether it was myself or anybody else—we talked about it, admitted it, tried to figure out how to correct it, and then moved on to the next days work.

So finally I called him in one Saturday in June of 1976, thirty months after I had given up the chairman's job, and just said simply, "Well, Ron, I thought I was ready to step out, but I see that really I wasn't. I've been so involved that in a way it has put you under a real handicap." I told him I wanted to come back in as chairman and CEO, and have him assume another job—vice chairman and chief financial officer, I believe.

In the global economy, successful business is going to do just what Wal-Mart is always trying to do: give more and more responsibility for making decisions to the people who are actually on the firing line, those who deal with the customers every day.

I hate to see rivalry develop within our company when it becomes a personal thing and our folks aren't working together and supporting one another. Philosophically, we have always said, Submerge your own ambitions and help whoever you can in the company. Work together as a team.

One person seeking glory doesn't accomplish much; at Wal-Mart, everything we've done has been the result of people pulling together to meet one common goal—teamwork—something I also picked up at an early age.

At Wal-Mart, if you have some important business problem on your mind, you should be bringing it out in the open at a Friday morning session called the merchandising meeting or at the Saturday morning meeting, so we can all try to solve it together. But while we're doing all this work, we like to have a good time. It's sort of a "whistle while you work" philosophy

If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you're taking care of the people in the stores. That's the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart's success.

These days, the real challenge for managers in a business like ours is to become what we call servant leaders. And when they do, the team—the manager and the associates—can accomplish anything.

I learned this early on in the variety store business: you've got to give folks responsibility, you've got to trust them, and then you've got to check on them.